Bonobo Females Handier With Tools Than Males

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Bonobo Females Handier With Tools Than Males

A new study of tool use in bonobos suggests females of this great ape species are handier than males.

That's also been seen in chimpanzees, but it was thought that chimps could be an aberration. Instead, the new study hints suggests that female-driven technological innovation could be the norm in humanity's closest cousins.

"We think that there is this difference in the Pan genus: Females are better tool users than males," said primatologist Thibaud Gruber of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.

The findings, published Oct. 8 in Animal Behavior, started with field work by Gruber and fellow St. Andrews primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler. They saw that wild bonobos used tools as readily as chimpanzees – a surprising finding, said Gruber, as bonobos are generally considered to be socially rather than technologically sophisticated.

The researchers followed their observations with a study of 20 captive bonobos at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Once again, they found extensive tool use. But that wasn't all. "We found out that bonobo females were much more keen on using different tools for the same task than males," said Gruber.

In chimpanzees, it's been proposed that the tendency of females to find new ways of cracking nuts or fishing for termites comes from the extra time that young females spend with their mothers. But most of the bonobos at Lola are orphans, said Gruber, suggesting an inborn rather than acquired propensity.

"Their mothers were killed before they could be taught anything. They're arriving very young, at two or three months of age," he said. "The caretakers are showing them all the same things. Over time it seems that females are just picking up way more than the boys."

Gruber speculates that female chimpanzees and bonobos might be adapted to tool use because "they're usually smaller and less strong than males. They also need to cope with pregnancy. They have to develop other techniques to acquire as much food."

It's an open question whether these gender-based proclivities have an analogue in humans, said Gruber. It's easy to think of chimps and bonobos as snapshots of earlier phases in human evolution, but they've also evolved in the 3.7 million years since sharing a common ancestor with Homo sapiens.

That said, the tendency toward female tool use could certainly have emerged before the split. Perhaps "it's not so much the idea of men the hunters that should prevail," said Gruber. "It's females the foragers."